State Senate Republicans last week came down hard on Gov. Spitzer‘s revolving-door Parole Board, which has been releasing the state’s most violent felons at rates not seen since the Cuomo administration.

And good for them.

The numbers are striking: Last year (Spitzer’s first in office), the board authorized for release 235 murderers, rapists and other violent A-1 felons – 17.5 percent of all requests they heard. That’s up from 11.5 percent in 2006 and 5.8 percent in 2005.

Those 235 included, most famously, convicted cop-killer Shuaib Raheem – who’s yet to even admit that he gunned down Officer Stephen Gilroy in 1973. (The Board only rescinded its authorization when word got out that it hadn’t heard testimony from Gilroy’s widow or NYPD comrades. Happily, it announced Friday that Raheem won’t be paroled after all.)

No wonder Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and his Senate colleagues on Tuesday proposed numerous changes to the way the Parole Board does business – including requirements that all decisions to parole class-A felons be unanimous (Raheem’s near-release came on a 2-1 vote) and that all board members hear impact statements from victims.

Common-sense measures all – but Bruno & Co. still deserve special credit for anticipating a long-term consequence of the historic drop in crime engineered by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Gov. George Pataki.

To wit: Because ’90s-era tough-on-crime policies – including Pataki’s reversal of his predecessor’s lax parole policy – were so successful, public sympathy has slowly shifted back from the victims of crimes to the criminals themselves.

In a sense, that’s only natural: For many New Yorkers, violent crime simply isn’t as scary as it used to be.

And if that’s true, why not give someone who’s served 25-plus years of hard time the benefit of the doubt?

For one, releasing a violent criminal before his full sentence is up always carries a public risk; as Gov. Pataki understood, one of the best ways to lower crime is simply to keep criminals off the streets.

But more than that, harsh punishment for violent crime is the best and only method society has to communicate the seriousness with which it values human life. As New Yorkers learned throughout the ’70s and ’80s, weakening the necessary connection between crime and punishment – even for those who are already in prison – is the surest path to social chaos.